China’s endless turmoil

Wednesday

Mar 6, 2013 at 6:00 AM

Liz Smith

‘Ihate social networking media even more than yucca fries! ... I communicate every day with dozens of people I’ve never met. Meanwhile, real friends never call. ... People beg you to ‘like’ their page, as if that will somehow add substance to their yearning existence.”

So writes my friend Michael Musto, who sounds a teeny tiny bit disillusioned with the Internet.

•

Getting serious: Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” is the best, the finest, the smartest TV reporter in the world. Show me anybody else on the air who can match her these days.

In a time of reality programming mania, drones, vampires and the undead, and talking heads aimlessly nattering on, Lesley still goes out to get the really big true story.

So, if you missed her on “60 Minutes” Sunday, when she showed the building boom in China about to go bust, you really missed something. China has thrown everything into building Manhattan-type high-rise cities where people paid their entire life’s savings to buy space, but nobody can afford to live there — and nobody does. There are miles of high-rise buildings with empty lobbies and empty streets around them. These incredible clusters of buildings still stand empty.

The poor are seen gathering the crushed bricks, stones and sticks discarded when their villages were torn down to make room for an architectural tomorrow that doesn’t look like it’s coming.

Thinking this was the beginning of a building boom and the economy of a future modern China, many of these clusters display signs in their empty lobbies for the popular U.S. retail stores, cafes, fast food and health obsessions that we see in almost every American city.

But such “stores” are just Chinese wishful thinking; they don’t even exist.

This revelatory outing on CBS News has to be seen to be believed. Two days after Lesley aired this story, headlines yesterday read: “Chinese stocks plunge on plan to tax home sales 20 percent.”

The Chinese are going crazy over this development, a bubble burst like none other in all the history of modern construction and economics.

Also, China’s billionaire real estate mogul Zhang Xin, interviewed by Lesley for this story, told the CBS correspondent that she believes China’s inevitable shift to democracy will come within, perhaps even before, the next 20 years!